The ferry debate.

• Author: Carroll, Ed
• Position: Alaska Marine Highway System

The Alaska Marine Highway System takes criticism from all corners, despite broad belief that it's an essential service. With a new ship and some tough decisions coming, the state is also facing a future with competition.

When National Geographic staff writer W.E. Garrett and his family took a tour of coastal Alaska in 1964, aboard the vessels of the newly formed Alaska Marine Highway System, he gathered a classic travelogue of adventures in places few tourists had seen. The article's lush photos of the shiny new Malaspina, Taku, Matanuska and Tustumena illustrate a story of the opening of the coast by scheduled ferry service - one of the first infrastructure projects the new state pursued.

Those photographs could have come from Alaska's family album. They show tourism in its infancy, when a National Geographic staff writer could load his family into the Geographic Society's new Dodge motor home for a pioneering trip north. They show a tree-topper's exciting work near Thorne Bay and the new Japanese lumber yards in Wrangell, at a time when these were viewed as signs of progress.

"For residents of the Alaska coastline, many of them cut off from the rest of their state and the world by water, ice and lack of roads or rails, the new year-round ferries - added to long-established service by tour ships, freighters, and planes - have brought a virtual end to isolation," Garrett wrote for the June, 1965 National Geographic. Few coastal residents have doubted the marine highway's value since.

Recent studies by the McDowell Group for the AMHS show a compelling argument for continued state investment, although the studies do not address alternatives. For $29 million in state support in 1994, the study concludes, Alaska received a $114 million direct return and $57 million of indirect economic benefits.

The study also shows benefits spread throughout the state, including employee payroll and capital improvements, but also the flow of tourism dollars attributed to independent travellers who rely on the ferries for at least one leg of their trip. That money seeps far from the ferry routes, the study concludes, throughout Southcentral and into the Interior.

In many ways, that old article foretold the ferry system's future. It tells of opening coastal towns to increased trade and tourism, and its use as basic transportation. The story hints at the continuing debate along the coast about the system's operations and future, for which just about everyone has...